Newly freed spectrum should give public/outdoor WiFi a shot in the arm.

The FCC made a landmark decision today that should give your local free city/telco-provided outdoor WiFi a serious speed boost.

So what's changing? The FCC has freed up 100 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band, which will allow for much higher potential WiFi speeds when connected through public hot spots. Theoretically, speeds could hit 1 Gbps, but that kind of speed won't happen for quite some time. However, the hair-pullingly slow public WiFi you're used to dealing with (like yours truly in Santa Monica and the like) should come to an end.

From the announcement on the FCC website: "The rules adopted today remove the current restriction on indoor-only use and increase the permissible power which will provide more robust access in the 5.150-5.250 GHz band. This in turn will allow U-NII devices to better integrate with other unlicensed portions of the 5 GHz band to offer faster speeds and reduce congestion at crowded Wi-Fi hot spots such as airports and convention centers."

In short: Spectrum and regulations reserved for in-home network equipment will now apply, in some form, to equipment used in public spaces. This will definitely be of help once more 802.11ac devices make it out into the world.

Fingers crossed that the decision makes way for more, and more robust, city- or town-run WiFi networks!

TheMemoman:Is it so that the government can spy on you without so much lag?

Government spying takes place server-side. There's no need to chase the strands when they can sit at the nodes.

It's kind of like the stereotypical fear of "Evil Socialist" government goons coming up your driveway to "redistribute the wealth". Nope. All they have to do is fiddle with the numbers at the bank and change the rules on payroll checks.

And, frankly, given the way the KKK and Al Qaeda have been handled, I would strongly suspect any site with active anti-government dissidents to be run by the government anyway, with a good chunk of the traffic being bored NSA, CIA, FBI agents alternately pretending to be rebels and writing reports on one another.

Great now every person without a 5GHz transceiver has a reason to go out and buy a new Wifi card for their laptop. Oh, wait. The tech industry got every buying those stupid un-upgradeable tablets. Methinks tablets manufactures are behind this ruling stuffing cash into FCC officials' pockets. Can't be the worst thing they've done by a long shot, though.